So, I’m finally getting around to putting down some thoughts about the final episode of season 1 of Mercy Street, the PBS drama about a Civil War hospital in Alexandria (I already recapped episode 1, episodes 2-3, and episodes 4-5).

We left off with the hospital preparing itself for a visit from the president and First Lady. The Knights of the Golden Circle are preparing for the visit, too, but they don’t want to welcome the Lincolns. They want to blow them and the entire hospital to Kingdom Come.

We start with a bit of drama about Doctor Foster being promoted. Doctor Hale and Nurse Hastings have been conniving all along to get rid of that terrible, no good, very bad, clearly-more-talented-and-therefore-unbearable Doctor Foster. I found it all a bit unnecessary. Also unnecessary was the scene a bit later where Nurse Hastings gets so drunk that she’s literally falling all over herself. It seemed pretty far from the conniving, fake-it-’til-you-make-it-even-if-you-are-less-skilled attitude she’s shown previously. Continue reading →

I am more than a little behind in my recap/review of Mercy Street, but I’ll make an effort to get to the end of this season (there were six episodes) by the end of this week. Time will tell if that actually happens.

And there will be spoilers. You are hereby warned.

Episode 4 picks up on and runs with a thread that was only hinted at earlier: the efforts of the ladies of the Green family to help the Confederate effort in whatever way they can. It’s easy to forget the role that women played in wars throughout history, and I don’t just mean on the home-front waving their flags. There were simple efforts like sewing socks and shirts for the boys, but when organized (by such groups as the United States Christian Commission and the United States Sanitary Commission), these efforts proved to be of no small importance to the war overall. First of all, notice the “United States” in the name of both organizations. There was certainly organization in the South, but it wasn’t at quite the same level as in the North. Second, these organizations rallied incredible amounts of supplies, medical and otherwise, for the troops. The armies in general were much better-provisioned than in previous wars (thanks to railroads, industrialized production, and a more mature government than, say, the Continental Congress, which had to beg for money from the colonies to feed the Continental Army). Third, think about the word “sanitary” and what that means in a military context. During the Civil War, disease was still by far the biggest killer of soldiers, but following Florence Nightingale’s efforts during the Crimean War in the 1850’s, people were beginning to wake up to the necessity of good sanitation and cleanliness.

(As an aside, I quite like Nurse Mary’s repeated, half-goading references to Miss Nightingale when she’s speaking with Nurse Hastings, who made such a big deal of having trained under Miss Nightingale.) Continue reading →

I’m a little behind with my recaps/reviews of Mercy Street, so I’ll catch up on two episodes at once. I don’t want to recount everything that happened in these two episodes or critique the episodes. Instead, I want to touch on some historical points from each episode, though I’ll get into some storytelling aspects, too.

These two episodes, I’m happy to say, really expanded on what I thought was best about the first episode: an examination of the Civil War era that considers more than the slavery question and delves into some of the sticky moral quandries of Confederates, Yankees, enslaved blacks, and free blacks. There’s an acknowledgement that actual experiences were extremely varied, even in the same place at the same time.

In episode 2, we see more of Silas Bullen, the nasty piece of work who’s apparently in charge of the hospital’s kitchens. Not only is he lying to and raping Aurelia (the black laundress who took her own freedom by running away to Washington City); he’s also profiteering off of the food he’s meant to be preparing for the wounded men. When Mary intervenes with the intention of getting the men a proper meal, Bullen is violent with her. What I liked about this was that we see a little of the dirty underside of war–on the Yankee side. We also see a little of this when Mr. Green, the owner of the hotel that is now a hospital, deals with the Union army officers in charge of the city of Alexandria. What he does isn’t dishonest per se, but it’s a pretty good illustration of the kind of uneasy existence between occupier and occupied: the Union Army took over his hotel as a hospital, and now he’s started a coffin business to bury the dead men coming out of the hospital.

It’s important to remember that Northerners had friends in the South (and vice versa) and that they oftentimes sympathized with Southerners (and many Southerners were Unionists; look at Andrew Johnson). Copperheads (peace Democrats) were prepared to make peace on the basis of the Union “as it was”, i.e., with slavery intact. Loyalties were divided, interests overlapped, and it wasn’t always possible to delineate who was for what.

Later, we a disagreement between Aurelia and Belinda (the Greens’ former slave). They argue over the meaning of freedom now that they’re both free. In many stories, it’s assumed that freedom itself is the end-point, and what comes afterwards in some happily-ever-after. It was all too easy for the social structure of slavery to continue on under a different name. Add to that the fact that freed blacks often lacked education and experience, and it could be difficult for freed people to establish new lives. Aurelia is taken advantage of by Mr. Bullen in one sense, and Belinda is taken advantage of in a different way by the Greens (she isn’t being paid wages). Samuel Diggs, an attendant at the hospital, has been able to create a life for himself, though it’s circumscribed. He has the talent to be a doctor, but, being black, that isn’t an option for him. It’s interesting to see these three characters clash over their views of what it means to be free–because then, as now, it oftentimes means different things to different people. This all comes to a head when a boy visits the hospital with his mistress (Dr. Foster’s mother), and Aurelia encourages him to run, to just walk away from his mistress and take his freedom for himself. He hesitates, but eventually, he does it.

The boy’s mistress, Mrs. Foster, is Dr. Foster’s mother, and she’s a Southerner. She has brought her son, Dr. Foster’s brother Ezra, to be treated. He’s been wounded in the leg, and she hopes Dr. Foster can save the limb (he can’t). In the meantime, she’s very hard on Dr. Foster for being a traitor, and she blames him when he says the only way to save Ezra’s life is to amputate. To her, he’s a traitor to the South who doesn’t care enough about his brother to try to save his brother’s leg. Families, especially in border states, were torn apart. Friends ended up on different sides of the war, too (look up Lewis Armistead and Winfield Scott Hancock). One couldn’t simply draw a line on a map and say that everyone above this line was for the Union and everyone below it was for the Confederacy.

But maybe the most interesting part for me was the medical side of things (this show is set in a hospital, after all). First, we have the harrowing amputation scene. I’m glad they showed the use of anesthetic; contrary to popular perception, anesthetics were used during most operations during the Civil War. They spent quite a gruesome amount of time on the operation, but luckily I have a strong stomach. The detail they went into with the operation itself was great–with slicing through the skin and folding it back and tying off the veins and sawing through the bone and all. It was ugly, but it was mesmerizing to watch. We also see Dr. Foster under the influence of morphine, administered using a hypodermic needle. We got a hint of this in the first episode, but it was more front-and-center here. Now, opium abuse had been known in Europe for a long time at this point (see Thomas de Quincy’s Confessions of an Opium Eater), but morphine and the needle were new, and the scope for recreational use and abuse was exponentially increased. We also get to see another kind of medical issue: “soldier’s heart”. Tom, the young Confederate we first met in episode one, is suffering from the after effects of battle. He says (it may have been episode one) that he’s “seen the elephant”. That was a phrase used about and by those who had seen battle and been traumatized by it. Tom, sadly, seems to have a bad case of it. He lashes out at his fiancee, Alice Green, and seems unable to focus or reconcile himself to life after battle. I mentioned this in my last post, but this kind of affliction was only beginning to be recognized as “a thing”. Either earlier wars didn’t elicit this kind of reaction in soldiers (the Civil War was much bloodier and death was more mechanized than in any previous war), or people were just beginning to give it a name. (I think it’s probably both.)

All in all, I’m enjoying the view we’re getting of life during the Civil War in Alexandria. I said I wouldn’t critique, but I will say Mercy Street has it’s moments of melodrama and that it’s view is slightly myopic in that our characters’ lives aren’t interwoven with the events of the war, which are mentioned mostly in passing only. The first is more problematic than the second, but neither keeps me from enjoying the miniseries. I’ll recap episode 4 at some point; episode 5 is this weekend.

I might not blog about every episode of the new PBS drama Mercy Street, but I’ll at least blog the first episode, which aired a week ago today. As background, Mercy Street is set (sometime) in 1862 in a hotel converted to a military hospital in Alexandria, Virginia. Our protagonist (played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is Mary Phinney, a young widow who has come to volunteer as a nurse at the hospital. We in short order meet Dr. Jedediah Foster, who is slightly abrasive but willing to take risks and who comes from a slave-holding background in spite of being a Union doctor. We also meet Dr. Byron Hale, a more by-the-books doctor who clashes with Dr. Foster. The owners of the converted hotel are also hanging around town, though most every other Southern sympathizer has fled and/or joined the war effort. Most prominently, we meet Emma Green, a young woman who, in spite of being quite inexperienced with, well, everything, seems intelligent enough and has a desire to help where she can.

I’ll start with a few notes on historical stuff. I won’t be critiquing the costuming, which looks fine to me but which I’ve seen some real hard-core enthusiasts pick apart. I’ll just comment on things that a casual viewer might have missed.

First, we open with Mary Phinney waiting to be seen by Dorothea Dix. Miss Dix, a real person, is known largely for her advocacy for the mentally ill but was also Superintendent of Army Nurses during the Civil War. And, as depicted, she had certain standards. She would only appoint women who were over 35 years old and rather plain-looking (which would preclude our heroine, Mary Phinney, on both counts). This was, as is implied in Mercy Street, to keep eligible young women from the potential hazards of being surrounded by so many young men (and perhaps the men from being tempted by pretty young women). By hiring and firing nurses for her own reasons, Miss Dix irritated Army doctors, who would have preferred to choose their own staff. She did great work, but because she was so inflexible in pushing her own people and point of view, her work was eventually eclipsed and superseded by other organizations.

Also, a note on the first scene: we are told we are in “Washington City, 1862”. (Mary meets Miss Dix in the city before being assigned to the Mansion House hospital across the Potomac River in Alexandria.) This is correct: in the early-to-mid 19th century, the usual term was Washington City. The District of Columbia was still fairly sparsely populated (the war would transform the city practically overnight), and Washington City itself only filled a small part of the federal District. Georgetown filled another sector of it, and the rest was mostly empty. (Alexandria had been part of the original 10-miles-square diamond that comprised the District, but the Virginia section of the District retroceded back to Virginia in 1847, leaving the half-complete square shape we know and love today.) At the time of the Civil War, the federal city was called “Washington City” almost exclusively.

Mary and Miss Dix then have an exchange about whether slavery is a moral or political issue (I believe Miss Dix is trying to draw Mary out, but it isn’t exactly clear). It’s an interesting discussion, because it illuminates the Victorian notion that women weren’t supposed to discuss politics, but if they couched their arguments in moral terms, then they might be able to make themselves heard. Slavery was one of those issues where it was, if not desirable, sometimes grudgingly admitted that women might comment, but only on a moral basis.

The one thing I didn’t like about this discussion (and the point comes up again later in the show) is Mary’s insistence that “emancipation is upon us”. Well. Not really. It’s quite a stretch to say that in mid-1862 the end of slavery seemed nigh. Sure, many people were hopeful and working for the end of slavery, and, yes, Abraham Lincoln would soon write the Emancipation Proclamation (and issue it in September). However. The implication of Mary’s words is that the public and political opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of the abolition of slavery, and it simply wasn’t. Even when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, it met with some heavy resistance, and it didn’t really do much effective good. At this stage in the war, it wasn’t clear to many people that the war was entwined with slavery, no less that slavery was effectively done. For Mary to state that slavery was clearly on its way out at this point is either something of a misunderstanding of how attitudes changed during the war or an indication that Mary is woefully misinformed about things.

Alexandria, when Mary gets there, is depicted as almost a Wild West town. This is fairly accurate, actually; the Union Army had moved in, so thousands of ill-behaved young men descended on the city. It didn’t help that they knew the town was full of Southerners and Southern sympathizers. They didn’t have much patience to spare on the enemy. There are some pretty wild tales of the lawlessness of the place at this time.

Now, as we get further in the episode, we see some great examples of Civil War medicine, which is pretty fun. We see a plaster cast being placed on a broken leg, we see a hypodermic needle (with morphine!), and we see an artery being tied off (by a former slave–cool in itself). I liked that after the artery was tied off, the former slave who did the operation, Samuel Diggs, comments that the doctor should tug on the silk thread that would protrude from the healing wound. The thread would rot and come away when the wound was healed. This is called a ligature (as Samuel tells us), and it’s something I learned about at the Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, MD. We also see a case of “soldier’s heart”, which is portrayed as something like heart palpitations. I know that soldiers’ heart COULD manifest itself in the form of heart problems, but “soldier’s heart” was mainly used as an early term for what appears to have been PTSD–that is, for soldiers who were overwhelmed by the horrors they’d seen.

One of the best parts of the episode, I think, is the wounded soldier who claims he’s eighteen but eventually admits to being fifteen. He’s in a battered uniform, and his father was killed beside him in battle. The American flag he’s holding was glued to his hands by dried blood. (Why did no one try to soften the dried blood to take away the flag?) He’s badly wounded, and Mary starts to write a letter for him back to his family. I liked this sequence mostly for the letter, which was a bit intense. Luckily, the writers wisely had the characters comment on the intensity of the letter, breaking the tension a bit. The poor boy dies before the end of the episode, his letter unfinished. (A bit confusingly, Mary goes back to finish the letter, though it actually wasn’t clear earlier that she hadn’t finished it and it’s unclear how she could possibly recall the boy’s every word.)

As Mary’s first day at the hospital comes to an end, she has a conversation with Dr. Foster by the light of a lamp. The discussion opened up the world a bit by giving it some depth. Most Civil War-era stories are very dualistic: the good North, the evil South, or evil slave-holders, victimized slaves/valiant abolitionists. Sometimes, there’s a dash of the romance of the “lost” culture of the “gracious” Antebellum South (you know, the Gone with the Wind vision). But in most stories, the intricacies of the inter-sectional ties are ignored. Families and friends were divided in loyalties in ways that simply aren’t acknowledged. And, as the disagreement over treatment of Confederate soldiers demonstrates, there was more than one way for a person to demonstrate moral failure. In this exchange, Mary challenges Dr. Foster for having racist views, and he challenges her for not wanting to treat wounded soldiers just because they’re Confederates. They both have a blind spot, and that’s interesting.

This episode had some great moments, and the fact that they’re tackling this setting and subject is a major point in the show’s favor with me. I would have liked to see a bit more life to the episode. It felt a bit like they were hitting particular marks, and though the acting was decent, it also felt by-the-book. While we are introduced to a cadre of characters (maybe one or two too many) and are efficiently informed of their situations, the characters themselves didn’t necessarily emerge quite yet from the cocoon of their situations. Mary, for instance is “the spunky nurse who’s recently widowed”, but I didn’t get much sense of her beyond that.

My first thought is that a bit of humor would go a long way. It’s the surest way to let your audience connect with a character. I know that Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches was source material for the writers. I wish they had taken note of the gentle humor Alcott used to get her readers closer to herself and the men she tended. (On a side note, I also recently finished reading the memoirs of a WW1 nurse, Olive Dent, and she, too, made liberal use of humor to help introduce us to the sometimes-grizzly world of a wartime nurse.)

Most people know the tune from The Battle Hymn of the Republic, even if they only know the words of the chorus (“Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah, his truth is marching on”) or the first line of the first verse (“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord”). Even those who know the song might not realize that it’s a Civil War-era song with heavy meaning in relation to the war and American history in general.

The version of the song most remembered today, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, was not the first version by any means. During the Civil War, the earlier song “John Brown’s body” was probably better-known and more popular. It turns out that in 1861, in a Massachusetts battalion (the 2nd Infantry Battalion), there was a man named John Brown. Now, of course, the famous John Brown–the one who dragged five proslavery men from their homes in Kansas and hacked them to death with the help of his many sons, and the one who had tried and failed to take over Harper’s Ferry and start a massive slave uprising across the South–had been executed in 1859. Then, as now, soldiers liked to rib one another. The men in John Brown’s battalion started saying things like, “You can’t be John Brown; John Brown’s dead and in the grave!” Before long, they were putting their jokes to the tune of a camp-meeting song called, “Oh Brother!”. The “Glory, hallelujah!” chorus was retained, but the verses were changed to, “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave, his soul is marching on.” The soldier John Brown was of course the “soul” that was literally “marching” on.

The song caught on quickly. The silly genius of the refrain is that, when the battalion marched along belting out the song about John Brown, everyone assumed it was the John Brown they were singing about. Many Northerners approved of old John Brown’s mission and even his methods, and they took to the song.

This happened early in the war, and it was still early in the war when Julia Ward Howe, a young woman with strong religious beliefs, was in Washington City with her husband and a preacher friend ans saw the troops being reviewed on Upton Hill. Howe watched the spectacle and heard “John Brown’s Body” being sung by the soldiers. Her friend the Reverend suggested that she should put some more pious (read “more tasteful”) lyrics to the song.

That night, November 14, 1861, Julia Ward Howe woke up in the middle of the night in her room at Willard’s Hotel (it’s still there–quite a historical location) and, apparently in a fit of inspiration, wrote out a poem of five stanzas to go to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.”

And what words she wrote! The more you examine the words, the more apocalyptic they seem. We start off with a bang, with the “coming of the Lord”, which is of course a reference to the Second Coming, also known as, well, the Apocalypse. Then we have the grapes of wrath–God is angry–and His “righteous sentence”. A trumpet sounds; the serpent is crushed under the heel; hearts are “sifted” at the “judgment seat”. Very pointedly, Howe writes that, “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”

I know that in some performances, this line is changed to “let us live to make men free”. But I really don’t like that. First of all, those aren’t the words the Julia Ward Howe wrote. She did not write them because (secondly) she was not being figurative; she was writing about a real war and real men who were really dying. When she writes about the camps and watch fires, they are literal. What she was seeing was an earthly manifestation of God’s will. To change the word “die” to “live” absolutely derogates the deaths of the many men and women who died for this nation and for freedom, as far as I’m concerned. And what exactly does it mean to “live to make men free”, anyway? It’s pretty weak. Saying nice things is never going to be enough. Action and sometimes death are necessary to preserve freedom.

Backing up a step, we might ask, why the (melo)dramatic, apocalyptic tone? When you think about the times Howe was living in, it becomes clearer. When she wrote the words, the war had only just begun, yet it was already taking on dimensions that were breathtakingly different from any war that had come before. The Battle of Shiloh, just a few months after Howe wrote the words of the Battle Hymn, had more casualties than all previous American wars combined, in one battle. Shiloh was just the beginning. The slaughter went on for four years. The pace of war was different from previous wars, with rifled guns and powerful artillery and trains and the telegraph; and there were unimaginable numbers of casualties to go along with the new technologies. This must have been very unsettling for the people of the time. It might well have seemed like the End really was nigh.

The lyrics aren’t actually about the Apocalypse, though. That language is rhetorical (and would have been very familiar to a culture that was drenched in the Bible). The point was to elevate the cause–the soldiers were fighting God’s war. It was a fight for freedom, and in this case, Howe certainly meant freedom for slaves (she was an abolitionist). So early in the war, not many others would have shared Howe’s vision of the war, so it’s a bit astonishing just how thunderous her views are. For her–as Lincoln later echoed in his Second Inaugural–the war was ordained by God, though she saw it less as just recompense for wrongs and more as a smiting of the sinful Confederates by the divinely-backed Federals. Same basic idea, though: this was beyond just a struggle over territory between two sections. This was a struggle between good and evil. Hence, in Howe’s mind, the apocalyptic tone was entirely apt.

Since the Civil War, the tune has remained very popular, sometimes being spruced up with new lyrics for new causes (such as “Solidarity Forever” to support workers’ rights). It’s also been played at patriotic events of all kinds, notably after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It was even played at Winston’s Churchill’s funeral.

It also happens to by mt favorite patriotic song:

For more about The Battle Hymn of the Republic, I suggest The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song That Marches On (Oxford University Press; 2013) by John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis. The Wikipedia page also has some great “further reading” ideas.